Location tracking for media appliances in wireless home networks

We present a location detection system for tracking multimedia appliances and users within a wireless local area network (WLAN) enabled home environment. Multimedia appliances communicate with a central gateway via low cost network interface devices called Buddies. The gateway can locate the users and appliances within the accuracy of a room and use the location information to automatically redirect media streams to user's presence. We call this paradigm as a Media cloud. This paper presents the scheme for collecting proximity information from the buddies and effective techniques to determine their location. We have implemented the location detection system and present an experimental performance evaluation.